Summer at Gaglow

by Esther Freud

  As he moved around the room Emanuel watched the dancing over Eva’s head. ‘One two three, one two three,’ he could feel her breath counting out the steps against his shoulder, ‘one two three, one two three.’ And he found himself longing to hiss some horrible truth into her hot ear.

  Angelika and Julika danced together, their slim bare arms clasped loosely round the other’s waist and their chestnut hair curled with the heat in identical cowlicks on their foreheads. They smiled at him from across the room, a turning circle of radiance, and he saw them as a two-headed mermaid, luring men ashore, with their sweet calling voices, to be crushed against the rocks.

  ‘I shall make my excuse and go,’ Emanuel swore, but almost before one dance finished another began, and his partners replaced themselves in his arms with a strange fluidity that was somehow lost once the music began again and Herr Friedrichson’s cane trotted out the steps.

  First Emanuel danced with each of his sisters. Martha, the tallest of the three, was the most graceful, while Bina, too used to years of leading, stumbled and hit against his boots. ‘One two three,’ she breathed and, like a swing boat, they moved stiffly back and forth across the room.

  The dancing class ran half an hour over its normal length to give each of the girls a chance to dance with the dazzling, uniformed guest of honour. Emanuel, after his very first waltz, had longed for nothing more than to slip away. He was prepared to give up the chance even of holding the delicate, blushing Julika in his arms to get back to the drawing room where he could lie in comfort among the polished dark wood of the furniture.

  ‘Oh, Schu, won’t you have a dance with Manu?’ Eva whispered, when the music finally stopped, but the governess looked straight into his eyes and said she could see the poor man was exhausted and needed to be left alone.

  That night dinner was served out on the terrace. There was a goose with thick crackling skin and a salad of broad beans, and as he ate Emanuel found that he was retelling, in great detail, how half of his regiment had been wiped out. ‘We were running towards a village when gunmen opened fire on us,’ he heard his voice, insistent as he chewed, drilling on and on, ‘but instead of firing back the call went out: “Don’t shoot, they are our own men retreating.” This was clearly not the case, but there was nothing to be done but curse into the ground, and attempt to avoid the torrent of the shells. It was only when our own artillery appeared and began to shoot that the order was given to advance, and all without a flicker of apology.’ He looked across the table at the bright eyes of his sisters and pulled himself up short. ‘I shall not describe,’ he said, ‘the trail of dead and injured for whom we were not allowed to stop.’ But he found he could still hear them calling out to him as he cut the meat in strips across his plate.

  Wolf poured him a glass of wine. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, and unable to think of what else to add, he shambled off towards the cellar to draw out another bottle.

  Emanuel spent his afternoons reading in his room, aware at times of the rustle of one or other of his sisters as they summoned up the courage to interrupt him. ‘We’re going on a swimming picnic to the lake,’ Eva called, twisting the handle of his door, and he answered gruffly that he would still be there when she returned and would most likely see them all at supper. There was a hurt and painful silence, and he had to shuffle his papers ferociously and slam his book down on his desk before he heard her move away and take off at a run along the corridor.

  ‘How extraordinary that so little has changed here,’ he muttered, as he wandered round the house, and he failed to notice that the table was not so lavishly laid as it had been and that his mother wore the same summer dresses, with small alterations and adjustments, as she had the previous year.

  Even Fräulein Schulze seemed subdued. Her red hair looked strangely pale, pulled severely from her face, and the tasks she set them were overseen without her usual vigour. ‘It’s so good to have our Manu home again.’ Eva snaked an arm around her as they headed out over the fields to the lake.

  ‘For one more day.’ Fräulein Schulze nodded, and hardening her tone, she shouted to Martha to look where she was going. ‘You’ll tear your skirt if you swing along like that.’ She pulled her arm away from Eva, hurrying her along, and refusing to wave to the row of poor prisoners in their red trousers hoeing the field.

  Chapter 10

  I could hear the main maternity ward from the quiet of my room. Babies wailing, women laughing, visitors parading up and down, and above it all, the constant ringing of a squat grey telephone on wheels. On the third day I was moved to a bed right in the middle. A huge man sat almost beside me. He had a spider tattooed around his neck and he held his baby up against his chest, while the new mother slipped out on to the fire escape to smoke.

  A doctor came in to check Sonny’s legs. They were still bent high at the hip where they’d been tucked underneath his chin and I was warned that a breech baby often took some time to straighten out. The doctor eased him from his towelling Babygro and pulled his vest over his head. Sonny didn’t like it and his face creased up with alarm. ‘Nothing wrong with this one.’ He seemed unperturbed by Sonny’s screams, pulling him up by the hands to test his grip and pressing his hips flat, until his whole head was dark red with roaring. Unable to control myself I snatched him out of the doctor’s care. I wrapped him quickly, pressing his body against mine. His crying stopped. His hands clung in my hair and a great storm of love welled up between us.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Pam hung her head, ‘but it seemed wrong not to call Mike.’

  ‘He’s coming again today.’

  ‘And?’

  It was hard to know.

  ‘You’re not going to forgive him?’ She shook her head appalled.

  ‘Well, we did say we’d stay friends. Pam . . .’ I had a quick and guilty image of her on the day that we’d split up, rushing from her car with cigarettes and brandy and a bunch of bright blue flowers. ‘I’m too sick to smoke,’ I’d wailed, and at each end of the sofa, our feet pushed into cushions, I told her about Mike and his reaction to my news. ‘He said I’d tried to trick him, planned it, was ruining his life,’ and I bit furiously into toast to stop myself from feeling sick.

  ‘You’re not going to keep it?’ She drank my brandy for me. ‘What about your career?’

  ‘Come on.’ I didn’t have a career, we both knew that. The occasional odd job on the Fringe. Someone’s daughter, sister, wife. A small tour around the Lake District.

  Pam topped up her own glass. ‘I give up.’ She raised a toast to the tiny speck of baby and knocked it back in one.

  ‘So what are you going to call it?’ she asked, snuggling down, and we lay there for the rest of the day until we came up with Daisy. Daisy Pamela Linder. And I swore I’d never take him back, however much he begged.

  Mike came back the next day to collect his things. I’d considered packing them but decided it was too much trouble.

  ‘Ruin your life? I wouldn’t waste my time.’ But he looked at me, superior and cool, suggesting we try and remain friends. ‘Friends,’ I yelled, my mouth out of control, ‘who loathe and detest each other.’ And he walked off, straight-backed, down the street while I lay down in the hall to cry.

  My mother arrived at the hospital with a box of Portuguese cakes. ‘How are you feeling?’ Before I had time to answer tears were rolling down my face. She sat and held my hand. ‘It’s all right.’

  When I found my breath, I stuttered, ‘He didn’t come.’

  ‘You’re doing fine.’ She shook her head from side to side with little soothing tuts, and I thought of her, all those years before, waiting to see if my father would appear.

  Mike had a taxi waiting. He’d come to take us home. I was dressed in real clothes for the first time in a week and Sonny had a soft wool cardigan over his suit. His eyes were open, liquid and long, and the skin of his lids was mauve. ‘I bought a hat for him,’ Mike said, and he stooped to slip it on. It was a pronged hat that came down over his eyes and he
looked so funny in it, like a little bag of flour knotted at the top, that I had to clutch my stomach to stop my stitches pulling while I laughed. The woman in the next bed made us stop for a photograph and we stood there, the three of us in a group, just like a real family, all ready to go home. ‘Here you go’ – and the flash of the camera woke me up.

  I was lying on my own bed, fully clothed with Sonny squashed under my arm. My sisters, not Mike, had brought us home. Natasha had even cleaned her car in honour of the drive, and when I arrived I found fresh flowers by the window and Sonny’s crib set up beside my bed. They’d heaped the sofa with pillows to support my feeding arm and set out lunch on the table. There was Greek food, white bread with feta cheese, cucumber cut up into squares and a tomato salad thick with coriander seeds and olives. My mouth, acclimatized to hospital food, stung with the sharp tastes. I hope this doesn’t affect my milk, I wondered, sucking specks of chilli off an olive, and I heaped my plate with more.

  There had been no news from Mike, and the thought of him mingled with my exhaustion. What I hate about him most, I decided, is that just when I’m feeling really furious it occurs to me that he might, just possibly, have been run over by a bus.

  I shifted a little to look down at the baby. He was on his back with his arms up by his head, his fingers, still wrinkled with loose skin, curled out like a starfish, and collected in the sweet pout of his mouth was a tiny row of bubbles. Natasha and Kate must have crept out by themselves while I was asleep because from my bed I could see a mobile of transparent shells, a present from them both pinned up against the window.

  It was three more days before Mike called. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he started, ‘but I was suddenly called away on a job.’ And I could tell that he was desperate to say more.

  ‘I don’t care, there’s no excuse.’ I clenched my body hard against a rush of tears.

  ‘Someone dropped out, and I had to go off without any notice. We were out on location, and when I did get a chance to phone it was always after midnight. You know what it’s like.’

  ‘I don’t know, actually.’

  ‘Look, can I come round?’

  But I gripped my sweating hand and very calmly said he couldn’t. ‘I don’t want to see you,’ I explained slowly, as if to a child. And for a moment even I believed that it was true.

  Sonny was two weeks old when we set off for our first sitting.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose we’d better be late.’ I strapped him into Natasha’s car, and with great care we pulled out into the traffic.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this.’ Kate leant over from the front and I tried to explain it had seemed a good idea at the time.

  ‘You’re completely mad.’ Natasha was the only one of us who never sat. She’d done one picture when she was sixteen, ‘He made me look like a cross-Channel swimmer,’ and she refused ever to pose again. Kate, like me, had modelled countless times.

  ‘He’s a difficult person to say no to,’ we protested.

  ‘Your problem,’ Natasha cut in, ‘is you’ve got nothing better to do.’

  ‘And neither has Sonny,’ Kate pointed out. Kate worked as an editor for films. It was a job like mine with endless lulls. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ she insisted, ‘this is going to be my last painting.’ And Natasha said that now he had another model he could afford to let her go.

  ‘I like sitting,’ I said, and I thought of the soft light of the studio, the stories and the food, and I tried to make myself remember to ask him more about Emanuel Belgard and what had happened to him in the war.

  ‘They never mentioned him,’ my father said, once Sonny was lying beside me on the sofa. I’d had to explain he wouldn’t tolerate even a minute without his clothes.

  ‘He was a sort of black sheep, as far as I can tell, although he did have some extraordinary adventures.’ And I begged him to think up what they might have been.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he murmured, but he was too taken up with fitting Sonny in under my arm.

  I had propped a pillow under my shoulder to support myself while I looked down on my baby’s sleeping face. I found I could stare at him for hours, the rounded eyelids, pale purple, and the eyebrows, a tiny sketch of gold. The hair on his head was dark, a little oily fringe around the back, but with each day I noticed it was lightening.

  My father stopped, a stick of charcoal in mid-air. ‘Could you just turn her a fraction this way?’

  I shifted my arm and rolled the pillow. ‘Him,’ I corrected, and I took the opportunity to brush his warm cheek with my lips, feeling for his toes which didn’t quite reach down into his towelling feet.

  ‘Do you need a break?’ he asked, quite out of character, but I didn’t want to waste the time while Sonny slept.

  Sonny was a charcoal outline, his nose up in the air, his hands like paws, and as my father took a small brush and mashed it up with paint, I watched to see where he would start. He always started with my eyes, but I knew from glancing at other canvases this wasn’t always the way. There was one abandoned mouth, a nose, a knee pressed close against another and one disembodied penis, hanging from a smudge of ginger hair. With one swift move he started on Sonny’s ear. He curled the pink lip over, swirling up the colour to form the sinews of the shell.

  ‘You’re working so fast,’ I said, when finally we stopped.

  The paint had spread out to incorporate Sonny’s mouth, blistered into coral from continuous sucking. He muttered as I slipped away, his hands flying out to catch me, but he was too full and drowsy to wake up. It made me laugh to see him at a distance, a plump green bug against the sofa flowers, and I tore myself away to make some tea.

  ‘Do you want a cup?’ I called through to my father, but he was watching Sonny as he slept, moving his head from side to side to try to measure him against the work. He hesitated, his fingers teasing out his rag, and I held my breath for him to be wiped out. ‘Tea?’ I said again, and he held out his hand for a cup. I’m so glad I’m doing this, I thought, as I snuggled back on to the sofa, glancing down at the rise and fall of Sonny’s breath, watching while the paint built up around the ear, thickening against his skull.

  ‘Oh, yes, I do remember one thing,’ my father said, surprising me. ‘My mother, when she was a little girl, gave Emanuel some bosom-enlarging pills as a present on his birthday. ‘“Pilule Oriental”, she said they were.’ And he smiled to himself as he worked on.

  It was not at all what I’d expected. I’d imagined embroidery and silk, heavy silver watches and ashtrays in carved glass. ‘Was he pleased?’ I wondered.

  ‘I don’t suppose so,’ and we both started to laugh.

  As soon as we got home, Sonny woke up and it was midnight before he was tired enough to sleep again. ‘Oh, Pam,’ I wailed into her answerphone, ‘why did I ever agree to this?’ But Pam had been cast as a suspect in a detective series set in Leeds and wouldn’t be back for several weeks.

  ‘How did it go?’ Natasha called the next day, and choking on my pride, my eyes red with exhaustion, I said it had gone really well.

  Mike sent a card with a cheque tucked inside it for two hundred pounds, ‘Hope you’re both thriving,’ and there was his telephone number, quite unnecessarily printed in brackets after his name. Pam had made me promise not to call him, ‘You’re better off without the selfish, thoughtless bastard,’ and I knew that it was true.

  Chapter 11

  Emanuel refused to take the carefully prepared food Marianna tried to press on him, but packed his bags instead with books. He left hollow dusty spaces in the library where entire volumes were prised out and then abandoned, left lying in piles on the centre table. The books he chose to take were all poems and philosophy. Kleist and Nietzsche. Strindberg’s The Agony of Conscience, from which he memorized whole passages, and Schopenhauer’s Correspondences.

  ‘I have been promoted,’ he told his family, as he set off for the train, ‘to the staff of the regiment.’ But he fought off their warm congratulations, their surprise tha
t he hadn’t mentioned it before, and insisted that his predecessor had been dismissed for misspelling a word.

  ‘Well, really, Manu, this is wonderful news.’ His mother moved to embrace him, and slipping her hand into his, Eva whispered, ‘But you would never make a mistake like that so we won’t even think about it.’

  Bina narrowed her eyes at him. ‘A simple German fulfilment is the greatest thing about this war, greater than all the brilliant deeds of individuals, and it is only because of this that we are winning.’

  Emanuel stiffened, and Wolf turned sharply on his daughter and asked where she found the opportunity to air such views.

  ‘Are we really winning?’ Martha asked, but Bina put her chin in the air and refused to answer.

  Emanuel looked over at his father. Wolf’s hair had turned from grey to silver in the course of the last year and the two lines between his still black eyebrows were held now in a perpetual frown. He knew that his father had guessed what his mother and sisters never would: that this promotion might have come to him months earlier, possibly at the end of the previous year, if he had been the son of another, more established family.

  ‘Well, in my opinion it is the best possible news.’ Wolf put a hand on his son’s shoulder, and together they walked towards the carriage. Eva followed, kicking small stones with the scuffed ends of her shoes. ‘Manu,’ she called, but the horses had begun to rustle, sidestepping against each other, ready to be off. ‘Manu.’ As she turned she saw, framed in the long window above the porch, the pale figure of her governess waving in large urgent strokes.